


The Seeker, and Other Visions

by mellonbread



Category: Call of Cthulhu (Roleplaying Game), Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game
Genre: Abusive Relationships, Body Horror, Canon-Typical Violence, Delta Green, Dissociation, Drug Use, Dubious Consent, F/F, F/M, Gen, Ghouls, Gunplay, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M EPIC, M/M, Majestic 12, Masturbation, Mind Control, Non-Consensual Body Modification, Suicidal Thoughts, The Shoggoths (Cthulhu Mythos), UFOs
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-29
Updated: 2020-10-30
Packaged: 2021-03-08 18:54:21
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 15
Words: 17,816
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27271507
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mellonbread/pseuds/mellonbread
Summary: Collected fictions written by mellonbread, based on the Delta Green Roleplaying Game





	1. PILLAR OF SALT

**Author's Note:**

> Legal disclaimer, as required by ARC DREAM
> 
> _Published by arrangement with the Delta Green Partnership. The intellectual property known as Delta Green is a trademark and copyright owned by the Delta Green Partnership, who has licensed its use here. The contents of this document are ©mellonbread, excepting those elements that are components of the Delta Green intellectual property._

It was a well lit, windowless reading room. Dr Redding sat at a large table with a sheaf of scanned pages, hand-annotated in pen. She slurped noisily at the dregs of an ice coffee, probably cut with bourbon, and returned her attention to Agent BRIGHTON. He stopped thinking about doing indecent things to her breasts and returned the favor. This was probably important.

The armed and armored “campus police” officer behind her hadn’t let his attention waver for a second, like any self respecting law enforcement officer would have if asked to watch someone read a book. He had watched both of them, the same way BRIGHTON knew you watched a patrol wandering toward your position. Wondering if you’d have to shoot them. Ready to shoot them.

She was talking again. ‘Hey, no more woolgathering, pay attention!’ he told himself.

“-alchemist Hsin Yao (that’s the Anglicization I’m going with, sue me) kept one alive in a vat of brine. He was kind enough to leave a recipe, which agrees with what we already suspected: a high salinity liquid environment. Almost exactly like the one at Green Springs. So for now, let’s assume we’re dealing with the same thing.”

“Right. And what do they do, in their high salinity liquid environment?” Good question, let her know you’re paying attention.

“Not much, if left to their own devices. They filter feed, and secrete a couple compounds that  _ might _ be valuable if you didn’t have access to a modern chemistry lab”

“Mmm. And if  _ not _ left to their own devices?”

Dr Redding grinned. “That’s where things get interesting.”

She flipped to the next scanned page, spun it 180 degrees, and slid it across the table to BRIGHTON.

He stared at the old Manchu sorcerer’s anatomical drawing.

He wished  _ his _ coffee had bourbon in it.

* * *

Dr Cross scrambled up the rock shelf. His body was described by those who knew him as “ninety percent leg”, and this was advantageous for hopping fences and swiftly scaling slopes. Fences like the ones the company had put up around Green Springs. Slopes like the ones leading up to Green Springs. Sure, the protestors had the right idea. But the company had already cracked the karst when the lawsuit went forward. The pools were already draining. Whatever ecology existed there would be gone well before the court ruled. Which meant anyone who wanted to study its totally unique population of isolated halophiles would be shit out of luck.

Not if he had anything to say about it. He was going to take a sample if it killed him.

Green Springs was a series of shelves, terraces and benches, Some tilted, some featureless, some eroded into hoodoos and other strange shapes. The name was probably some prospector’s inside joke, amusing only to a handful of grizzled pioneers two hundred years dead. The only green thing on the cliffs was lichen, and it was really closer to white. Whatever. Dr Cross was a microbiologist, not a geologist. He had his heights set higher - literally and figuratively - on the springs at the top. The ones that issued forth salty, steaming pools with chemical mixtures found nowhere else in the world.

There wasn’t much cover on the slopes. He was easy to spot, and would only get easier when he pulled on his PPE at the edge of the spring. That was fine. By the time any of the company’s guards realized what he was doing, it would be too late. He’d have his readings and be halfway down the other side with the samples before they were halfway up.

He slipped his goggles, gloves and boots on before rounding the last rise to the top. He knew from experience that it sounds like overkill right until something hit you in the eye. Then he hoisted himself and his bag up the final lip. The water level in the pools had already declined to almost nothing. Disappointing, but at least validating his decision to come out _ right now _ . He set down the bag, pulled out his gear, and carefully crunched his way toward the crusted edge of the pond.

First thing he noticed were the markings at the bottom of the pool. Regular, sinuous patterns in the hypersaline muck. Like snake tracks with scoring alongside, as though whatever it was had dragged itself with dozens of spindly limbs. An animal, come to lap at the salt crystals like a deer? The mix in the pool was toxic to almost everything, but that was a big  _ almost _ . There were sheep in the Orkneys that ate nothing but seaweed, ingesting quantities of salt that could killed creatures ten times their body weight. Or had someone been up here before him, and dragged something around in the pond? Dr Cross’ mind momentarily overflowed with dark thoughts, about other sons of bitches from the graduate department, who may or may not have upstreamed him.

Something moved in the mushy waters of the pond. Cross stopped ruminating, suddenly interested in science again. An animal, fallen into the silt, slowly dying of salt poisoning? It slithered closer, sidewinding through the pond. Its spindly limbs irregularly broke the surface, grasping for purchase and then hastily withdrawing.

“Holy shit” said Dr Cross.

This was fucking huge. Literally. You never saw macrofauna in hypersaline environments. Diatoms and itty bitty fungi, maybe some algae. Nothing this size. His mind was abuzz with possible explanations. Some kind of marine worm? Tube worm? A siphonophore?

It stopped moving, and made a clicking sound, like a toad snapping its hyoid bone. 

It leapt out of the murky water toward him, before he could hit “record”.

* * *

The demonstrators didn’t know what to make of Agent BRIGHTON and his goons, piling out of their van in funny looking cleansuits, carrying mysterious equipment. Then they heard the words “EPA” and they cheered.

BRIGHTON argued viciously with the company guards at the fence. It was dumb, and he knew it. He should just pull rank and push through, take care of the mission. But he was getting old, and got his jollies where he found them. If he couldn’t get his rocks off with any frumpy, round bodied librarians, he was going to get every ounce of satisfaction he could from chewing out this rent-a-cop. So he yelled louder and louder about the possible chemical emergency seeping down the mountain, and the half-wit enviro engineers who didn’t do their fucking NEPA certs properly, and all the other buzzwords he had memorized to play this role. Eventually, the secondhand embarrassment grew too strong for Agent BREE. She gently inserted herself between the old man and site security, flashed her badge, and gave them a number they could call if they wanted to complain.

Then they went up the hill.

It was a torturous hike in their CBRN coveralls. Nevertheless, they circled around the side of the mount, using the scarp to block line of sight from the trailhead where the guards and protestors were sat. Better not let them see the rifles and plate carriers they took out of the cases. The big bundles of thermite.

They mirrored the last rise before they went over, like a proper SWAT team. The fiber optic didn’t see anything nasty, but they still went over with guns at a low ready. BARRY wanted to toss a flash before they went over the top, BRIGHTON told him not to be such a dumb son of a bitch.

And there was nothing there. Nothing living, anyway. They hit the pools with the little GPR unit, mapping the bottom for signs of the loveable critter from Dr Redding’s photocopies. No dice. BREE tossed in a few rocks to make sure.

Then they spotted the tracks. And the footprints.

Thanks to the legendary bollocking given him by BRIGHTON, the site security chief had not seen fit to inform the “EPA Agents” about the long legged science-person he had spotted descending the hill to a fire engine red Tahoe parked at the edge of the Bureau of Land Management road, twenty minutes before their arrival.

* * *

Dr Cross drove down the Bureau of Land Management road, trusting Google maps more than his memory to direct him back to the highway. He could barely remember coming in, let alone the climb up to the springs. Oh, he must have made it up and back. His sample containers were full, his canteen was empty, his boots were crusted with salt, and every physical object on his person was soaked with sweat.

“Chalk it up to heat exhaustion, I guess”, he said to no one in particular.

He rolled his head around, cracking his neck. There was a tight feeling in his chest, like heartburn mixed with high blood pressure. No problem. He’d pull into the next gas station and pick up a thing of Tums. And a bucket-sized Coke.

He was still  _ very  _ thirsty.


	2. THE HAND AND THE HEART

He comes over whenever something bad happens to him, and he needs to take it out on someone. He brings cheap liquor and shoves past you when you open the door, heading straight for your fridge to rummage for a mixer. If he can’t find it, he shouts at you and drinks it straight from the bottle. If he can, he mixes it and shouts at you. Then he drinks and things get worse. 

You always think about hurting him. About smashing the bottle over his head and stabbing him in the neck with the neck. Pushing him over in the shower, so it looks like an accident. Rolling him face down after he passes out so he chokes on his own vomit.

This time is a little different. Your arm lashes of its own volition. Your palm brushes his throat and something inside snaps out like the radula of a cone snail. There’s a wet little “pop” and he drops to the ground, spasming, clutching the hole as his neck and face swell.

**Nice going, babe.** The voice whispers. **Could have waited ‘till he got through the door...**

He stops thrashing. Something tells you the swelling is putting too much pressure on his spine.

**Get him inside, before someone sees.**

* * *

You wake up after that. It was a nice fantasy, while it lasted. His clothes are all over the bedroom but he isn’t in bed. You listen in case he’s stomping around the living room, or rifling through the kitchen for breakfast. You don’t feel exposed or dirty like usual. Your hand stings.

If he’s rummaging for food, he doesn’t make a sound. You can only wait in suspense and fear for so long before you need to pee.

The bathroom smells like a plastic bag filled with lysol and rotting garbage. Something large and man-shaped sizzles and sloughs as it dissolves in the tub.

**See, funky baby? I told you I’d take care of it.**


	3. PUT ME BACK IN THE CROWD

Drowny sat on the couch, crying. She was called “Drowny” because of a joke someone had made when she was a child. This had been her first assignment: A man (almost a boy) with a promising future, though he did not see it at the time. He was young enough that he would have loved her pathetically if she demonstrated affection. An easy assignment for a new Siren.

When they heard Drowny’s distressed cries, the other two Sirens excused themselves from their obligations and rushed to her side. They quickly spirited her away to a place of safety, bringing red wine and microwave popcorn to quiet her sobs.

The larger of the pair carried a wheel gun of large caliber wherever he went, and for this reason was called “Bronson” by the others. Even when he was a she, which was right now. She wore the gun in a shoulder holster that chafed and irritated her thoracic gills through the fabric of her undershirt, but refused to switch to an inside-waistband, which she groaned would unnecessarily augment the swell of her already overgenerous hips. Bronson paced, wishing she had something to do.

The other, called “Smolt”, was small, almost childlike. He wore a gorgeous suit in his daily life, but had removed it and his dress shirt to avoid stains while he delicately sipped blood-with-wine from Drowny’s neck. He rubbed her shoulders and sucked her blood, secreting a depressant into the vein that calmed her until she was able to explain what had happened:

Drowny had begun as instructed, with dream sendings. Visions in sleep, to make the man’s heart ache for the love that abandoned him when he woke in the morning. Then a chance meeting on one of the rare occasions he went outside. A smile. A touch on the hand.

It was pure vanity to take him to the beach that night. But he was so sweet, so willing, and she wanted her first time with her first mark to be beneath the waves. To be special. And the elixir was brewed to perfection. She had tested it on a kitten and watched as it paddled around inside the fishtank, learning to inhale normally when she pushed it under the water. She gave the man a draft of it, mixed in her flask with a strong, sweet spirit that disguised the taste. On the dark shore of the ocean she looked human, even without clothing. Or if he noticed the delicate folds of her opercula, the minute webbing of her toes, he said nothing, already entranced. Naked and shivering, he looked small and sad. Drowny took his hand and pulled him out to sea.

In the lightless dark beneath the surface of the ocean he clutched her in fear, even knowing he would not drown. She pulled him into her. He clawed at her with increasing vigor, scraping blunt nails across thighs and breasts and shoulders. She thought his floundering was the floundering of love. That he was about to seed her, fulfilling her mission and her promise to the Circle. Giving her her first child. Then his asthma strangled him and he died. The serum had stopped his lungs from filling with water, but they filled with sputum all the same, choking him.

  
  


“Talk about anticlimactic.” Bronson shouted from the other room, looking at the dead man laid out on the kitchen island.

“Quiet, you.” Smolt had finished his meal and was enjoying a cigarette, taking the smoke in through his mouth and letting it out through his gills.

Drowny shrank in on herself. “I fucked up, I was supposed to get a baby and-and I killed him, and I have to go back home and disappoint everyone, and, and-”

“Relax, okay?” Smolt pressed an extra-large bandaid to the wound his dentition left in Drowny’s neck.

“Yeah, this kind of thing happens” Bronson came back into the livingroom. “Besides, we fixed it when we came in.” 

“W-what?”

“Just be thankful he was a guy.” Smolt mashed out his cigarette. “Wouldn’t work otherwise.” 

Drowny frowned in confusion. 

Bronson grinned. “Should be kicking in right abouuuuut…”

There was a sound from the kitchen. Metal and ceramic clattering to the floor.

“...Now”

The dead man stood naked and dripping in the doorway, skin blue and gray and wrinkled. His salt-rimmed eyes did not blink. Drowny croaked with joy, for her lover had come again. The match would be salvaged and she would carry his child.

His mouth opened. He sighed water and stepped forward to embrace her.


	4. THE SEEKER

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This story contains the sexual abuse of a mentally ill person.
> 
> Knowing this, do you still wish to persist?

_ The seeker soars across seas of hydrogen, boiling even at subzero temperatures thanks to pressure differentials in the atmosphere. Up ahead, rising from the ocean: a palace, carved from a single piece of solid rock, the only landmark on the whole world. Its ramps and slopes and terraces are stained with eons of proton snow, stippled and speckled in colors that shine without light as it reacts with the chemistry of the stone. _

_ The seeker lands on the shore of this magnificent pharos. Steps over tidepools full of scintillating algae that gurgle and sizzle and glow cherenkov blue as they refine droplets of protium into deuterium. The seeker thinks on the symbols of passage and she is inside. The structure is not hollow, but the geometry of its construction has nonetheless created interstices which merge together at odd angles to form an interior space. The space is oddly lit because of the way gravity flows within its geometries, bending photons from their natural course. The seeker closes her eyes and lets these crushing wells tug at her thought patterns, bringing her into communion with the minds that built this strange and wonderful place. As though a great weight hanging over her has suddenly been lifted, she sees- _

A sharp kick through the mattress beneath her brought Jennifer “Jen” Hattie back to the 6’ by 8’ world she shared with the woman who just woke her up. Back to the thin blanket and the scratchy clothes that made her want to scream, which she would never ever wear to sleep if it wasn’t so  _ cold _ . Zardoz was out chasing rats, otherwise he’d be curled up with her, waggling his bottlebrush tail and purring in his sleep.

Another kick from the bottom bunk.

“Jen, come down here”

Jen shivered. “I’m ok”

“C’mon, I can hear your teeth. It’s making me crazy”

“No, I don’t want to fuck right now”

“Who said anything about fucking? You’re gonna get sick and sneeze everywhere. Just get down here”

The first time Amy had offered to share blankets and body heat, Jen had crawled into her bed without a second thought. Now she knew what Amy  _ really  _ wanted. She knew that Amy would pester her all night, wouldn’t let her get to sleep anyway. Would be pissy in the morning and sulk for days afterward. Jen could tell her to  **go to sleep** and it would work. But she knew Amy would just wake up wanting the same thing. And giving it up would buy her off for a couple days.

Jen wadded up her blanket and hopped down to the cement floor, cold even through her socks. Amy shifted back against the wall, bed creaking under her enormous bulk, and Jen climbed in with her. The massive woman barely waited for Jen to tug the second blanket over the first, before grabbing her like a stuffed animal. Jen squirmed to get comfortable and the big oaf squeezed possessively.

It was sweaty and cramped, bundled up in Amy’s arms. But it was also warm. This wasn’t the part that Jen hated. The one that hurt. The rhythmic thud of her heart was just enough to lull her back to sleep, even with the way Amy’s muscles twitched minutely with every beat.

_ A race of crystal minds, brilliant optical computers that channel reflected sunbeams into thoughts at the speed of light. They worship the Panjudicator, whose face shines down in a particular wavelength of blue light that produces in them a form of religious ecstasy. They cast apostates into a lightless pit, where their brains will sit without photons to actuate them, frozen in time until the heat death of the universe. The seeker stretches her fleshy mind to encompass the enormous wisdom they have for her. The Panjudicator’s light is faltering, his path through the firmament slowly bringing him closer to his twin, the Destroyer, who shines a dull red. The priestly caste of these sunlit sufis offers a solution: one hundred thousand of their number must- _

Amy was licking her earlobe. She pushed the collar of Jen’s shirt down and sucked on her neck, biting hard enough to bruise but not break the skin. Jen screwed her eyes shut and tried to get back to the other side.

_ Radiotrophic echinoderms on a trinary pulsar planet, turning their feathered faces like sunflowers to streams of electromagnetism. In their song and their skin lies the secret to transmuting three continent-sized blades of radiation into life giving energy. The seeker strains to listen as they whisper to her amid the cascade of gamma rays- _

Amy was undoing her shirt to paw at her tits with big, rough hands. Zardoz had nibbled at them earlier and they were still sore.

_ At the bottom of the ocean, in hydrothermal trenches where the sunlight never penetrates, a pudgy brittle star with a five lobed brain the size of a minivan squirms along the seabed, feeling its way by subtle senses, thinking only- _

Amy’s hand was down her pants, two thick fingers pushing into her. Jen gave a little wheeze and Amy shoved.

_ The Lord in his sunken crypt, dreaming wild dreams of sleep and waking dreams of dominion. The seeker presses her ear to the slimy stone, to hear the Sleeper’s thoughts seeping out of the- _

Amy was hissing in her ear, “Come on baby,  _ come on _ .'' Getting rough.

_ At the center of it all, the seeker joins a cacophony of piping, drumming, singing voices, exalting in- _

Jen was crying. She couldn’t concentrate and she couldn’t get away and it  _ hurt _ . She tried to yell at Amy to stop but it was like someone else in her body, someone who couldn’t move her mouth, just freeze up and make little nonverbal “urp”-ing sobs. Which Amy thought meant Jen was almost finished. Which was good, because then she would stop, but Jen didn’t  _ know  _ that, she knew if she could feel her throat she’d be puking. Just knew that she wanted out out  _ out out out. _

_ The Most Prolonged of Life speaks to the seeker from behind his shimmering veil as they scream through time in space in a congeries of iridescent globes. Crossing branes and superstrings, he with patience infinite, she waiting with clenched teeth for the moment when it will all  _ **_end_ ** _. When she can just get to the other side and  _ **_stay_ ** _ there, and never come back to shivering in the dark and rough hands and scratchy fabric and- _

“Hey”

Jen was curled on her side. Hyperventilating, sweaty, sore. Facing away from Amy. Waiting until the roaring in her ears went away. Trying not to puke. Still wishing she could go back to sleep.

“Jen, c’mon, talk to me babe”

“...You always do it too hard.”

Amy kissed her hair. “I’m sorry hon”.

And she was. She was sorry, and she’d be sorry until she did it again, like with everything else.

Jen focused on breathing normally and hoped the world would stop spinning soon. Her clothes still made her want to scream, and now her eyes were bleary and sore from crying, and her genitals felt like one big aching bruise. And Amy thought she just did her a favor. And was going to expect it returned. Well, that was going to wait for another night, or at least until morning. There had to be at least a few hours until then. Time enough to get back to sleep.

Jen wished Zardoz would come back. She still didn’t want to sleep next to Amy, in case her cellmate wanted more sex. But waiting for her to fall asleep, wriggling out of her grip without waking her up, climbing back up to the top bunk, and shivering for the rest of the night wasn’t appealing either. A worse prospect than lying there and hoping Amy didn’t fuck her twice in one night. Amy was like a big radiator, her heavy arms like weighted blanket, and she didn’t snore, unlike some girls on the tier. It was enough to tamp down Jen’s urge to scream and run and look for somewhere to hide in the 48 square foot cell. To let her fool herself into thinking she was safe. Enough to lull her mercifully back to fitful sleep.

_ Peg Leg, walking down the carpeted hall past an infinite number of doors behind which are an infinite number of doors. The seeker, rushing after him, struggling to keep up despite his apparent handicap. Peg Leg’s eyes shine with great intelligence and he whistles a tune with the intent that the seeker try to imitate it. She makes her best attempt to follow note for note. The closer she comes to matching him, the closer she draws to him. The twenty six notes resonate and the doors begin to open. They are all open and they are infinite and they all lead to the same place. At the end of the hallway is a door and Peg Leg steps through it. He turns to the seeker, holding the door open to permit passage, for she knows that it will lock when it swings closed. On the other side is what she seeks. She steps forward into the- _

The fluorescent lights came on with the morning.


	5. IATROGENESIS

The cameras were looping and the nurses were deliberately avoiding the corridor. Nobody would see what they did in the patient’s private room. Nonetheless, YURIA pushed a chair to jam the door, while ECK pulled a syringe from the cavernous pocket of his enormous coat. A simple matter to slip an air bubble into the IV. The nurses wouldn’t come in to check when he flatlined, because the machines were always claiming this patient or that was dying, crying wolf one too many times. Then you claim the death was suspicious and confiscate the corpse for an autopsy. The body never comes back, the charts and x rays get buried under a mountain of HIPA tape, and the doctors are left with nothing but stories no one would believe.

“That won’t work”

The man on the cot had given no indication that he’d noticed them when they entered, or when ECK approached to lift the tube. His eyelids were peeled open in a permanent expression of incredulous surprise by a pair of bulbous crystals that gave no indication of sleep or wakefulness. Crystals where his eyes were supposed to be.

“The organism will recognize and disperse it before it reaches the heart.”

YURIA, gun in hand to cover ECK, suspecting a trick: “You aren’t supposed to be awake.”

The man smiled, but didn’t turn his head. Apparently the crystals’ facets gave him excellent peripheral vision.

“You arrived just in time. Twenty minutes and I would have walked out of here under my own power.” His voice had the bassy rumble of a much fatter man than he.

“Sounds like we should get on with it then.” YURIA gently suggested ECK, gesturing at the IV stand.

“It’s easier than you think.” The man tapped his head. “Swift destruction of the brain will trigger the cleanup function. There won’t be a scrap of organic matter left on these sheets within a few minutes. The rest of the job is done for you.”

“You’re being strangely cooperative.”

“I told the doctors. I drifted into the oncoming lane by choice. I picked the semi because I was confident the driver would survive and I wouldn’t. I made a mistake.”

By this point ECK had noticed the man had no smell. Some kind of metabolic cleanliness where his skin should be coated with oils and sweat, even with the hospital staff disinfecting him.

YURIA scowled. “I don’t trust this fuckin’ guy.”

“It doesn’t change anything.” ECK put the cap back on the syringe. “We came here to do something, and now he also wants us to do it.”

“Easy for you to say. What if he doesn’t really melt? Then we’ve got a corpse with a fuckin’ GSW, iatrogenic illness right through his fuckin’ brain.”

“He’s right. He shouldn’t be speaking or conscious right now. If it really put his spine back together, it can easily shrug off a heart attack.”

“And that makes that shit about self cleaning true?”

“I’ll use my weapon if you’re concerned about the forensics.”

“Oh no you don’t. The fuckin’ can won’t fit on yours, and you know it.”

YURIA threaded the enormous gray tube onto her enormous gray pistol. The patient stared, still not turning to look at them. ECK turned on the TV and increased the volume. It was too easy, and they all knew it. You didn’t just slap someone through the head and count on nobody finding what remains. That’s what lazy people who wanted to get caught did.

YURIA stood back to keep the splash from hitting her. She slapped him through the head, before anyone changed their minds.

The shot didn’t blow their ears out, but it was audible over the TV. ECK listened at the door to see if anyone was coming to check. YURIA observed the dead man. She had shot him from the side angle so that the weapon could be pressed into his hand. But the cleanup would still be a risk, if he hadn’t told the truth.

“Hey…”

ECK stepped back. The dead man sizzled like bacon frying. Something moved under his skin.

Then it moved over his skin.

“Fuck fuck FUCK”

YURIA snapped the obstructing chair in half with a kick, clearing the door. ECK had time to stuff a hand in his coat pocket and shoot the oily, quivering mass twice with the tiny wheel gun he kept there.

Then it was over.

The blank faced man had been true to his word. There wasn’t a scrap of organic matter on the sheets. Or anywhere else in the room.


	6. SOFT SKIN

Anne winced at the daylight coming in through the blinds. It was much brighter than she remembered, and much clearer.

She was on her side, with a pillow stuffed between her thighs. She shuffled them together and the velvety fabric felt so good she almost drooled. It was tempting to go back to sleep.

Instead she arched her back, tossed her head, rolled her ankles and flexed her toes, sending a luxuriant cascade of cracks and pops through her body. This was good. This was very good. 

Standing up brought a momentary dizziness, along with a rushing sound in her ears. That was normal. The only real flaw she noticed was a vague itching in her legs. It had been a long time since she felt that after waking up.

Finally, she picked up a pillow and smothered the man still sleeping in the bed. Before he could wake up and wonder what was going on. How he got so old. And male.

Then she went to the bathroom, to check herself for track marks.


	7. GONG SHOW

The conference room at Heritage Place was either poorly designed or ingeniously designed - it was impossible to get a cell phone signal inside. That’s why Agent Marie-Ellie “Emee” Duquette of the Environmental Policy Impact Commission, Quebec Office, didn’t get a very important text message until half an hour after it was sent, when she stepped out of the refresher course on Gender Based Plus Analysis to piss.

It wasn’t an encouraging message.

Emee waited another twenty minutes for the class to adjourn for a break, then stepped back into the room. She almost bumped into Dr Reginald Kling. The only other EPIC Agent at the training, and the one she’d given a ride in.

“Meet me by the car.”

She pocketed the stuff she’d need, but left her bag in her seat. When in doubt, let them think you’re coming back.

* * *

Emee drove the car. Kling frowned at his phone. He had not gotten the message, but Emee knew him. She had worked with him. That meant he was trustworthy, for now.

“Are we burned?”

“Not yet.”

“Yet?”

“If I had to guess… I’d say the probe about the First Nations kids just turned over a rock and found us scuttling around underneath.”

Gears turned in Kling’s head.

EPIC had paid before for getting too chummy with the RCMP, and they were about to pay again. Officially, the latest ugliness involving the Mounties had nothing to do with them. Unofficially, they were counting on the GG to keep it away. But there were limits to the power of the Sovereign, and how much political risk she’d take on once it became clear what she was  _ really  _ protecting. Especially if the whole thing was exposed to the public. Which, if the message they received really came from the Director, it was about to be.

This was very bad.

“So we’ve got until it hits the news, then the heads start rolling.”

“Yyyup.”

“So…”

“So do you know anyone at the INFO building?”

“Yeah… Alb should be working today.”

“Well then you’ll say hi to Alb for us.” Emee swore in French at the three cars ahead of them. “You think he got the message?”

“...Probably not.”

“Great. You got a weapon?”

“No”

“Open the glove box.”

He opened the glove box.

“Now you’ve got a weapon.”

“I’m not clubbing Alb with a Maglite.”

“Do you want the skin thing in the National Post?” She ran a red light. “That video with you talking Dutch to all the fucking black hats, telling them they should all wait in the barn, like it was going to be ok?”

“...”

“They’ll dig it up when they find that. All the little burnt skeletons wrapped together like a big leather kite. You wanna do that to you? To me?”

“Fuck you.”

“You have…” Emee craned her neck to look over the traffic ahead. “Ten minutes to come up with a way to get all the shit out of the vault without hitting Alb with a Maglite”

They crept forward to the intersection. The box was blocked. She swore again, exhausting her menu of obscenities in Algonquin, English and French.

Kling took the heavy flashlight from the glove box.

* * *

**GO TO INFO**

**DESTROY OR REMOVE CONTENTS TO SAFE LOCATION**

**DO NOT TELL ANYONE WHERE**

**DO NOT TRUST ANYONE YOU DO NOT KNOW**

**DO NOT REPLY TO THIS MESSAGE**

* * *

Dr Kling didn’t have to hit Alb, because he wasn’t watching the door. They buzzed and waited and, when nobody came down to work the door, let themselves in.

You weren’t supposed to let yourself into the INFO building. It was meant to be a secure site for documents and artifacts retrieved by field agents. The reality was, without Alb watching the door, it might as well be wide open. The cameras and alarms wouldn’t stop an intruder before they got away with anything they felt like taking from the vault.

So really, Emee and Kling were making it  _ more  _ secure by breaking in. Plus, the penalty for breaking into a secure facility and torching the records was a lot less than the penalty for what was  _ on  _ those records.

The loading dock led through a series of four linked vaults, each devoted to a different type of processing or storage. One of these doubled as a series of offices, with high barred windows that let light into a warehouse-sized room that had been augmented with cubicles and reading tables. Dr Phillip Labonte, the (new) curator of INFO, was hard at work behind one of the tables, transcribing notes from a spiral bound notebook onto a small laptop. He stood up with a momentary flash of irritation. Then he pretended nothing was wrong and crossed the warehouse toward them.

“Ah, Agents…”

Kling and Emee both had their badges ready, so he had no excuse to raise the alarm, yet.

Emee put hers away, freeing up her hands.

Kling fumbled to get his back into his pocket. “Where’s Alb? There’s supposed to be a guard on the door.”

“He’s busy at the moment. An issue with the electronics…”

Emee looked around. “Could you get him?”

“Ah...” The archivist’s eyes flicked to the nearby maintenance closet. “He asked that I not open the door unless called for.”

There was a fizzing sound coming from the door, like electricity arcing into seltzer water.

“Mmm. He do that a lot? Repair electronics?”

“He mentioned it was something he was good at.”

Just outside Dr Labonte’s field of view, Dr Kling shook his head.

“Mmm. K, you wanna get us logged in?” She tiled a head toward an empty workstation.

Dr Kling depressed the lever on the standing desk and pulled it up to chest height.

“What is this… Visit about, Agent Duquette?” the curator inquired.

“I’ll explain in a second. I want to get everyone here.” She reached for the closet door.

“I really wouldn’t. There’s a significant arc hazard while he’s in there. You’d be putting both of you in danger.”

“Right.” She rapped on the door and shouted a greeting.

Labonte licked his lips. “Ah, he was wearing hearing protection when he went in.”

“Uh huh.”

She opened the door.

Alb’s body was folded in a corner of the janitor’s closet. It was a trypophobe’s nightmare, pockmarked everywhere with tiny holes bored all the way through. There was a swarm of something around it - fireflies that flickered with tiny arcs of electricity as they devoured a three dimensional cross section of his remains. 

Emee meant to open the door, verify that Dr Labonte was lying, then draw on him all in a single smooth motion. The flickering lights of the bugs did something to her head, like a little seizure. She didn’t turn around until he was already on top of her. And she really had no excuse for that, because he was shouting something when he did it.

“-take it away you won’t take it away-”

He beat his fist against her, ineffectually. Like an upset child. She reached for her pistol and discovered she couldn’t move her arm. There was something wrong with the side of her body.

Oh, he was  _ stabbing  _ her.

“-you’re not going to take it away from ME-”

She shuddered and whipped her whole body forward - which pushed the point into the bone on the last thrust, but threw him back. The blade in his clenched fist was long and sharp, with no edge and a triangular cross section. A bayonet? No pain yet, but the arm still wasn’t working. She grabbed with her other hand for the gun, awkwardly cross-drawing from the hip.

Too slow, he came forward again, spike angled for an upward thrust into the heart-

Kling hit him with the Maglite.

Dr Labonte fell onto his knees. Emee thought for a second Kling would try to help her, and leave the curator clutching the blade. She yelled a language-like sound and collapsed into a coughing fit.

She needn’t have worried.

* * *

The fizzing was gone. Alb and the bugs were gone. Dr Labonte was no longer an issue. Or wouldn’t be, once they got him into the vault with the rest of the stuff they weren’t taking. It seemed he had got the same message as them, at least. And without Alb and Labonte, they had the place to themselves.

Emee worried Kling was going to be a baby about taking her shirt off, but he surprised her again. He babbled the whole time, something about triangular bayonets and how they didn’t  _ actually _ make the hole harder to close up, it was just something they did to give the blade a stronger gross section. He bandaged and packed what he could, but the internals were cause for concern. Speaking louder than a whisper gave her a violent, wet cough that spattered enough blood to suggest something important and cardiovascular had been severed. She kept saying he’d be fine if she just sat there a second.

So Dr Kling walked behind Marie-Ellie where she couldn’t see, and he used an Approved Formula. She realized what he was doing as the last syllable in the Tongue of Dust left his mouth. She something and reached feebly for the gun, still slung on the wrong side of her body. Then it was inside her, like a bloodclot the size of a closed fist: The cancer that cured, turning itself into veins and arteries, tissues and platelets. Polluting as it repaired.

A piece slotted into place in Kling’s mind. The second time he’d had such a feeling, corresponding with this second time he had beseeched the Queen of Life for such healing. And even with only that second piece, the whole was beginning to take shape. Like the image entire was encoded in each totipotent cell. Like a stitch in a kite made of skin. Something to worry about later.

Emee hit him. Looked like her arm was better. He hit the wall and she caught him before he fell to the floor, surging out of the chair to box him against the edge of the table and hit him again. Legs were back too. She broke his balance and struck him a couple times more, before she was content to yell instead of swinging.

“How dare you how dare you how  _ fucking dare you! _ ”

“No, how dare  _ you _ .” He coughed a vile squirt of hot coffee that surged up from his abused stomach, considerably more acidic than when he took it down that morning.

"I told you what I would fucking do if you pulled that ever ag-”

He shoved her off him. “You want to bitch and whine about giving up, you don’t get to sit there and- and do nothing! You don’t get to leave me to do all this by myself.”

She swore the vilest streak she could in every dialect at her command. Benefit of his anthropology PhD, he understood (almost) every phoneme.

He picked up the Maglite and gave it a deliberate I-swear-to-God-I’ll-do-it rattle before stuffing it in his belt, in case she got any ideas about hitting him again. She pulled on her shirt, but left the jacket on the back of the chair, keeping a clear line between her hand and her belt holster.

Then Marie-Ellie watched the entrance, while Kling went into the archives.

* * *

Dr Kling had worked at INFO before, cataloguing unusual belief systems among the federation’s minority religions. He’d been shuffled out after the incident, when anyone connected to Dr Store fell under a pall of suspicion. Everyone except Labonte, who before Store’s departure had made himself too “essential” to dispose of. There were supposed to be all manner of new security rules, but the truth was that nobody was really willing to shake something like INFO too hard, afraid of what might fall out.

So Kling still knew the filing system. He knew which journals to throw into the wheeled plastic reshelving tub. He knew a handful of drawers in the last vault that were never supposed to be opened, but could be removed without spilling their contents. And he knew about the thermite disguised as halon sprinklers Turcotte had installed, which nobody was supposed to know about. And he knew there were a couple things which you couldn’t burn, because that would make it worse.

Then there was a gunshot from the office.

And another.

Two shots was almost a relief. It meant Emee hadn’t killed herself.

It meant she was shooting at someone else.

Had they been followed? Did Whitestone send backup, which Emee didn’t recognize? Or was someone here to capitalize on their newfound unpopularity? To empty the vault and make it look like a handful of guilty civil servants cleaning house? Was the investigation a cover for this - pushing EPIC over and taking their stuff while nobody was looking?

Another gunshot. Time to stop theory crafting and move. 

He had a heavy flashlight, a three hundred year old bayonet covered in blood, and a cart filled with trinkets that would leave Ottawa a smear of radioactive glass if activated. There were always the “sprinklers”, but someone was still shooting. Which meant Emee was still alive. And he didn’t put her through all that just so he could burn her, even if she’d tell him to do it. The Hi Power held fifteen rounds, and he hadn’t counted half that many shots. There was still hope.

Emee kept a Lee Enfield No 4 in the trunk of the duty car. It was the gun she carried as a Ranger, and they let her keep it when they swapped over to the new Finnish rifles. If discovered by mundane law enforcement, its presence would normally raise awkward questions about the Environmental Impact Policy Commission’s remit. To deflect casual investigation, she kept it in an evidence bag with all the appropriate pageantry, along with various other “samples” of environmental contamination.

Dr Kling had only fired it a few times. He hadn’t practiced the way Emee did it, with her hand around the bolt, using the middle finger to fire lightning fast. But he knew (or had been told) that a novice with a rifle could outshoot an expert with a pistol nine times out of ten.

The duty car parked at the loading dock outside. It was the only entrance anyone who didn’t work INFO knew about. Nobody knew about the back way, which led out past the TD office on the side street. He could circle round, get the rifle and hit them from behind. It was the kind of stupid idea Emee would have come up with. Which meant she might be expecting him to do it. Or pleasantly surprised. And it was better than charging in waving a flashlight.

He took off running down the hall, wheezing a little. The Queen of Life offered to help lever his bruised ribs back into place. He crushed the thought back into the box where it belonged.

* * *

He almost made it to the car.


	8. WATCHTOWER

The man had perfect control of his muscles - the Alexander Technique, they called it, a technique for controlling the body’s posture. Despite this he still drooled when he wasn’t speaking.

The woman was heavy-bodied, red faced and smiled often. Her eyes lacked the animating spark of a living thing and were difficult to look at.

Dumb adults liked to shout at you, to fill every quiet space with noise. The smart ones said nothing and let the silence hurt you. These ones were smart.

She couldn’t leave, and she wasn’t going to give anything up, so she kept quiet until the man talked.

“Did he sting you?”

She wished they’d stayed quiet. It hurt, to know that she wasn’t crazy. Maybe they were just humoring her. Maybe it was a way out. She didn’t say anything.

So then the woman spoke. “We need to know if he stung you because it will help us find out how old he was.”

They were taking it seriously. So she’d play their game.

“Yes.”

They didn’t ask where. She wouldn’t have told them. The woman wrote something in her note book.

More silence.

Then the man, again. “You did the right thing. Both protecting yourself, and what you told them after.”

She had told the truth. She’d stabbed until you couldn’t see his face. There wasn’t anything else to the story. No parts like a crab’s mouth. He tried to touch her, again, and she killed him.

That was all.

“So I don’t think I need to threaten you, but I’m going to anyways.” The man had perfect diction, like the people on TV. The woman smiled.

He spoke again.

“If you tell anyone what really happened, nobody will believe you. You’ll go to prison. The guards will be men like him.”

“Well, not  _ exactly  _ like him,” the woman allowed.

“You don’t know that,” the man equivocated. “A kids’ prison is a perfect place for one of them. Somewhere with defenseless people where nobody would notice. Just like a school or a hospital.”

Or a church.

“But what are the odds?  _ Really _ ?” The woman found it funny. Her whole body quivered when she suppressed laughter.

“Mmm.” The man frowned. The movement of every muscle on his face was a conscious decision. He drooled anyway. “If you keep your mouth shut, like you’ve been doing, this will go away on its own.”

“And if that doesn’t work, the news suddenly gets excited about the kid who killed a kiddie fucker, and that son of a bitch DA’s railroading her over it. Then some evidence gets lost, case falls apart.”

She said nothing. Saying nothing had got her this far. And you weren’t supposed to take deals from cops. She knew that from the people on TV too.

The woman folded her notes and stood up. It was hard not to notice how her tits bounced.

She’d been noticing that a lot, ever since. Sex stuff.

The man followed, doing up the bottom button of his blazer.

The thing that lured her to speak was a question that they seeded. Another cop trick, she knew, but she asked anyway:

“Who is ‘one of them?”

“Hmm?” The woman paused stuffing her notebook into the breast pocket of her coat. The man stood interrupted halfway into reaching for the door.

“The kind that’s in the schools and hospitals with the kids.”

The man slurped. The woman looked away.

“I’ll tell you what, hon: When this is all over, we’ll sit down, the three of us. And we’ll see if you still want to know who ‘one of them’ is.”

“And what’s worse, we’ll tell you.” The woman’s eyes had come back to life during the conversation. Somehow it was worse with them resurrected.

Then they left.


	9. JOYRIDE

History re-began for the underground world of K’n-Yan when they began to modify their memories with an ingenious drug, recently discovered by the priests of the Not To Be Named One. The first new thing in K’n-Yan in five hundred years, and they used it to erase their minds, so that everything would be new. Then of course, they forgot that they had forgotten, and once they had become bored again, chose to forget again. This vicious cycle rapidly became a whirlwind. Wars were fought over remembering and forgetting. It was a beautiful thing, for the people of K’n-Yan to have something to care about again.

M’ya, Mixt’a and K’yoth formed an affection group over their love for the old machines in the vale of Do-Hna. The ancients had preserved their mothballed hardware there when they abandoned technological civilization. Without the faintest memory of how the ancient machines worked, the trio took luxuriant pleasure in relearning, reactivating and refurbishing them. There were machines for transport, machines for work, machines for killing, and machines for fun. There were machines that could do all four at the same time, and that was the kind Mixt’a was elbows-deep in.

“While the other two do fuck-all”, he thought darkly.

“Don’t send me those bitter vibes, my love,” K’yoth sent in reply, lolling on her back and slurping a mouthful of intoxicating plasma from the drugtorch. She was distracted with M’ya’s feed. Before their lifter circuits had failed, had swallowed up a whole wagon of surface dwellers into the Transport’s storage matrix. Now he was taking them out two at a time, making them into new shapes and skimming their thoughts for amusing reactions.

The smallest one he had stretched out, forcing him to walk in a tip-toed gait to stop his massively enlarged penis from dragging painfully along the rocky floor of the arroyo. Not content to let him squat fearfully in the dust, M’ya gave the largest one a pair of hinged arms covered in razor sharp teeth, rewired her thoughts to view the little one as a prey animal, and sent her chasing him across the canyon floor.

The stretched one hopped and yelped, the toothed one slavered and clicked. K’yoth drank their fear and hunger, tasting the conscious thoughts beneath like a ripe purple raspberry, so sweet and sour it hurt her jawbones. She grew a bush of new genitals and began to fondle herself.

Mixt’a folded the fractal toolstump of his arm back into a hand shape, and closed the Transport’s access panel with a clang. “What could you  _ possibly  _ find in there you haven’t seen already?” he sent, sour mood scarcely improved.

“It’s a classic for a reason” sent back studious M’ya. But his attention had already wandered back to the scarred disc hanging above the plain, wide and yellow like the blemished face of a Gyaa Yothn. “Ayyo, think, friends: what could we find  _ there  _ that we hadn’t seen already?”

They had never seen the sky before. They weren’t even supposed to be here. Even among all the forgetting, everyone knew the surface was forbidden. But how wonderful the stars. How many new things might there be out here, and up there?

“So” K’yoth’s thoughtstream was interrupted by her own shout, the only sound she had made this whole conversation. “Fix the manifold and take us there.”

“The gritty air of this place has clung to the circuit of the lifter, overloading and rendering it inoperable.”

K’yoth gave a second crass vocalization. “So shape another.”

Long suffering Mixt’a grew a third pair of eyes to roll. “It is not so easily done as that. Observe.” He sent to the other two a diagram of the internals, letting his understanding flow into their brains. The crystal strands had to be recast in an atomkiln, not merely re-threaded.

“So return to the valley and fetch another.”

She tried to punctuate the rebuff by broadcasting him another drug fueled orgasm. Mixt’a angrily throttled the connection down to speech only.

“Ah yes. The first members of our race to breach the surface in a chiliad. A sheaf of chiliads. And what do we tell them? ‘We returned because of a small amount of dust, which vanquished our expertise’. Perhaps they would be too busy laughing to dismantle us.”

M’ya grew tired of the disfigured surface worlders’ capering. He raised a massive finger and discorporated both, packing them back into the Transport’s matrix. This action sparked a thought in his head.

“Aya, these creatures… They build machines...” He sent a picture of the cart that he had plucked them from - brilliant red, its wheels turned by the explosion of fuel. “They have workshops and manufactories, they must have atom power. Let us use their tools to fix the manifold.”

K’yoth stopped coming and sat up, folding her body back into its usual shape.

“My love M’ya, that is the least boring thought any of us have had all night.”  


* * *

The bogey had come down at night. That made the cleansuits a little less unbearable in the cool desert breeze. The masks still got in the way of a good cheek weld - Qi held his MP5 out in front of him, using sling tension to keep the stubby subgun on target. The target was a sphere, maybe three meters in diameter. Metal, blue-gray. Featureless except for a sculpted, octopus bearded face, glaring lifelessly from the smooth curve of the hull.

Infrared said it was giving off a small amount of heat, like a solid state machine on sleep mode, burning battery power. Geiger counter picked up higher-than-background radiation coming off it. Radar said the thing was impossibly dense, enough that it should be boring a hole through the earth and sucking in all light around it. But it wasn’t doing that. It just sat there. Klerk had spouted some inane hypothesis about a singularity drive giving off Hawking radiation, until Qi told him to stow it. They would have plenty of time to cogitate over it once they got the site squared away.

This was a bad shootdown, and Qi knew it. It wasn’t a shootdown at all. By the time highball had confirmed the bogey, it had landed of its own accord. They scrambled the Raptors just the same, in case it got up again. But so far the methhead pilots hadn’t got a chance to test the new Gabe stunners. Unknown contact GRAVE WINDLASS had sat there in the desert until the whispers could carry a team out. Which took the situation up to the present.

Which made it a bad shootdown because the thing could fly off at any moment. Or explode. Or open up and disgorge any number of horrors. Which is why the first priority after clearing the crash site was to fix the scuttling charge. Klerk and Bent covered Hal, who got within arm’s reach of the sphere to drop the payload. Then ran back, unspooling detcord as he went. The bomb could be set off by the radio detonator on Qi’s belt, but he’d once had a bogey revoke electricity privileges from everything in a six kilometer radius, rendering the charge inert. It wasn’t an experience he’d care to repeat. Hence, the manual backup.

“All good, boss” said Hal.

Qi had the same intrusive thought he always had: hit the button. Roast the damn thing, and yourself, and everyone within eyesight of it. Do everyone a favor.

He stomped it down, like always.

There were prints in the soil. Klerk dialed up the light amp on his gun camera and aimed deliberately at them, catching snap shots of their shapes and positions. Some were deep gouges, made by pointed limbs with chitinous joints. Some were furrows, where something long had dragged itself.

Some were human.

The squid face glowered. Qi dialed his own amp down, and his hunch was confirmed. Without night vision washing out all the colors, there was a faint blue light seeping from a seam in the side of the object. His first thought was Cherenkov effect, but it wasn’t hot enough in the infrared for that. No, this was something else.

Control buzzed in his ear: “Be advised, highball reports a possible second contact at the old Kerr McGee site, over in C&C. Team four is on route.”

The old nuclear waste dump. Fucking perfect.

_ Don’t hit the fucking button _ , he reminded himself.  


* * *

M’ya, Mixt’a and K’yoth half ran, half flowed across the desert. Exploding into clouds of mist and intermingling, then coalescing to couple in mid air before falling back to earth. Striding on two legs, then scuttling on ten or twelve.

Mixt’a carried the stored pattern of the repaired manifold. The crude surface-creature atomkiln had been a slagged mess, but languid K’yoth surprised him with an ingenious manipulation of the molecules, stoking the decaying pile back to life. Perhaps all her rubbing herself was practice for the rubbing of neutrons.

“The thought is unworthy of you, lovely Mixt’a,” sent K’yoth, spiralling above him and floating upside down while she sucked greedily at the drugtorch. “If you are so jealous of my stroking, mingle with me, so that I stroke your tepid membranes and mine with the same hand.”

Mixt’a sent her the most vulgar fantasy he could think of, centered around a repulsive fusion between the surface worlders, herself, and several of the agonizers stored in the Transport’s utility matrix. To which she immediately and enthusiastically agreed, and which M’ya amended with his own suggestions.

It was ever alert M’a whose manyfold eyes spotted the surface worlders gathered near the Transport. They had with them a flying machine of metal and plastic, with which they communicated using short bursts of sound and radiation. The trio immediately ceased their idle fantasizing, and put their imaginations to more productive use.

The K’n-Yani numbered three unarmed crackheads who spent two thirds of every day sleeping, getting high or jacking off. The retrieval team numbered a full squad of USAFOSI and Pararescuemen, carrying enough firepower to fight a battalion to a standstill, supported by a pair of the most advanced stealth helicopters on planet earth.

They didn’t stand a chance.

* * *

Mixt’a examined the weapons and items the men had carried. Not much had changed since last a surface worlder had carried the crude accoutrements of his race to the caverns of K’n-yan, five centuries ago. Their deathrods held more particles. Their armor was forged of superfiberglass instead of hammered steel.

M’ya debauched himself with the men themselves. He changed their bodies into shapes that caused them pain to exist, or pleasure so intense that they feared to live. He fused them together and made them stumble drunkenly, coordinating their many legs. He reprogrammed their basest desires, altered their bodies to capitalize on them, then turned them loose on one another.

K’yoth browsed the thoughts of the surface men’s chief, who she held helpless in her a dozen enormous arms. She deactivated his motor functions, carefully leaving the sensor nerves active and aware of what was happening to him. Inside his head, through the shock and denial, she felt a yawning void in his mind, a fear that fascinated him. Like a dreamer casting their mind down into lost N’Kai. A superstitious dread of his own desire to  _ press the button _ .

K’yoth snorted. To her, it sounded like a fine place to start peeling him. She shrank her hand until it was small enough to pluck the device - the locus of his apprehension - from his belt. She opened the cover.

“NO!” sent worldly Mixt’a, observing her feed, perhaps realizing what was about to happen.

K’yoth pressed the button.

For the second time that night, she unleashed the power of the atom.


	10. SHAN KILL ROAD

...This was way back in ‘73, you understand. We hadn’t got a fifty yet, like those showoffs in Armagh. It was me and my poor old SMLE, maybe lifted off an old free state cache back in grandad’s day. Who knows.

So I’m lying in a ditch, off the side of the road near Glencairn, waiting for a prod to walk into my sights. I’d like to say I was waiting for an LVF man, or maybe a proper British soldier. Truth is, I think I would have shot anyone that day. I’m in the ditch, where I’ve been lying all morning. The mist is hanging heavy and the clouds look ready to rain, so I’m worried it’s going to fill up with water around me. Bit of chill is nothing to sneeze at, excuse the pun, when you’re trying to pull off a tricky shot and you’re worried the fellow will hear your teeth chattering.

That’s when the man comes down the road. Spares me the indignity of crawling out the ditch with cold feet. I didn’t have a glass on my rifle but my eyes were pretty good, back then. And I could have picked his face out of a lineup at ten times that distance.

Some said he was an SAS man. Or SIS, or the Det, or Box 500. We’d all seen the blurry photo of him getting out of the lorry by the old pub. The little “wanted poster” they passed round the Company. We knew him for his shoulders, the mustache he didn’t shave even after he knew he’d been made. All the victims, the ones left in a state to talk, agreed that picture was him. This would have been two years before old Lenny Murphy got out of the gaol. But you ask me, he and the butchers were big fans of the Strangler’s work.

So he comes down the road and he stops. He stands there in his big jacket with his giant hands and his tiny face on his giant head. They always trained us to shoot for center mass. “Don’t fret about vests, lads. Hit ‘em square in the chest”. But I couldn’t help it. He was just standing there, mouth open. You ever see a snake taste the air? So I sight and I shoot him through the head, before he sniffs me out.

And I think to myself, in that moment as he hits the ground, “Christ, you’ve done it! You shot the Strangler!” House policy is to shoot once and bugger off, hit or no hit, before reinforcements come about. But I’m young and stupid, and all I can think of is running out to take a souvinier. Prove it was me.

Only, I don’t get that far. Three oh three ball doesn’t pop your head off like a dum dum would, but it makes a real mess. And something’s crawling out of that mess. Something big as a pigeon and ugly as sin. I blink in case it’s just the fog playing tricks, but it’s crawling out of there and foaming, sizzling like it’s melting. It scuttles all the way out like a bug and it’s got wings. It gives them a flicker like it’s trying to take off and I wonder if I should shoot it again. Or if I’ve just gone mad. Then it makes the choice for me and bursts into flame - like detcord dipped in petrol, just goes up. Then it’s gone and it’s just the dead man.

So when I tell the story, I leave out the part with the bug. Maybe mention it over a pint with a couple close comrades, but nothing you share with the Company. Wouldn’t be telling you now if you hadn’t asked.

Sometimes I wonder if it really was all in my head. Instead of in his, excuse the pun...


	11. I'VE TASTED DYING, AND IT TASTED GOOD

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story contains supernatural child grooming
> 
> Knowing this, do you still wish to persist?

Jenny spat the mouthful of jizz into a tissue, not really sure what to do with it. She slowly stood up, knees red and sore from the grain of the hardwood. She wiped her mouth.

Sam snorted, a full body movement that made the head of his cock bounce. “Cum dodger.”

When Jenny sat back on the bed, she was Vo again. Pinch faced, nearsighted Vo. He clutched the bedsheets dizzily while his mind reminded itself which parts of the world around it were actually his body.

“Don’t change back while I’m still here, fag,” the varsity athlete punched him in the shoulder, just a bit harder than was friendly.

Vo pulled his knees up to his chin. “That’s not funny.”

“Yeah it’s fucking hilarious, you fuckin’ queer.” by the end of the sentence, Sam was back to being Alice.

“That’s not what he’d say.”

“You know it is. He’s a  _ total  _ dick.” She flopped back on the bed, still riding the momentary high of strength and power and maleness. Vo sulked, feeling much the opposite. 

Alice did a couple stretches, readjusting to her gangly body. Which meant swatting and kicking Vo inadvertently, since there wasn’t actually that much space on the bed. The sweat was mostly dry before she spoke again.

“How do guys deal with it?”

“With what?”

“With needing to, you know…” She made a jerking-off motion. “All the time.”

“Oh... Pretty much like that.”

“Ha!”

She slid off the bed and went to rifle through her coat pockets, awkwardly tiptoeing to keep her bare feet as high off the cold floorboards as possible. She looked alright without any clothes, he thought. Not as good as Sam.

She retrieved a pack of cigarettes and practically dove back into bed, elbowing and twisting until she was under the sheets.

Great, now his room would smell like tobacco. Not that his dad would notice. But they smelled  _ bad _ .

“You shouldn’t smoke those. It’s going to mess up your lungs.” He sneezed. “You’ll get wheezy and get cut from track.”

“Pssh.” She blew smoke at him.. “Who needs to run? Next time anyone hits me, I’m roasting ‘em.”

“What?”

“Yeah. Dog showed me how.” She made a finger gun. “BANG!”

“Shh!”

“What, your dad going to suddenly stop being a cokehead and realize I’m here?”

“SHH!”

"He comes in and he’s like  _ what’s going on son, I heard someone going *gluk* *gluk* *gluk*- _ ” she did the pursed lips, tongue in cheek dick sucking gesture, “- _ and I came right away! _ ’"

“Shut up!” he tried to hiss, but he laughed anyway.

“Come on,” she poked his thigh with her toes. “Let’s go again. This time I’ll be Sam, but you be you.”  


* * *

Agents ROBILAR and REMONTOIRE pretended to be state police when they investigated the thing at the graveyard. No need to let the old groundskeeper know this had become a Federal matter.

He showed them the hastily exhumed grave of Karla Valentine, a local personality who had died of nothing-particularly-interesting. He told them about the four or maybe six figures he’d seen stooped over the open grave in the dark. Just kids, he’d thought when he chased them off.

Then he showed them the body.

“Ah fuck” one of the Agents said. Doesn’t matter who. They were both thinking it.

Karla Valentine’s skull was opened like a hard boiled egg - cracked carefully in a ring, then peeled. The brain was gone. It would have been shriveled into a leathery mess. But that hadn’t stopped someone, or several someones, from carefully removing it.

One of the items left at the scene suddenly made gruesome sense: a nickel silver tablespoon.

They did the forensics business. The cracks had been made by several sharp “taps” delivered by a sharp, keratinous object, before the skull itself could be removed. The spoon had saliva on it, along with traces of the wizened gray matter - which someone had slurped off it.

“Ah  _ fuck _ ” said the other.

The groundskeeper showed them a phone he found at the scene, dropped by one of the “kids” in their scramble to get away.

The screen was cracked, and soon, so was the password.

They both swore when they saw what was on it.

* * *

Jenny lay face down on the floor of her room, with the door and blinds closed. Her parents thought she was cramming for AP Latin. In actuality, she was practicing what the Talking Dog had taught her.

It was Vo who found the Dog, riding his bike along the interstate. It was an extraordinarily ugly Dog, lying on the side of the road, but it spoke to him in a human voice, asking for help. It had been hit by a car, and it could only drag itself around because its leg was smashed.

It was too big for Vo to carry on his bike - six feet, at least. So he called his brother Macky, who called Alice. And Alice knew that Jenny was hanging with Sam that weekend, who had his car. So Sam and Jenny swung around and picked up Vo and the ugly Dog. And that was the secret origin of Talking Dog Club.

The Dog was happy to be out of the hot sun, hidden in Sam’s parents’ garage. It was happy to be fed, after the gang made a quick run to the Burgerdrome for some cheap meat. And it was happy to have such clever children looking after it.

And it wanted reward them. Ingratitude did not glorify the Charnel God. And there was _ so much  _ it could teach them.

So in accordance with such teachings, Jenny pretended for a moment that she was Karla Valentine, whose rancid and shriveled brains she had shared with the others in the cemetery in the way the Talking Dog had showed them. She called the memories of Karla Valentine to the fore. She willed her body to grow older and become the body of Karla Valentine. She erased herself, and let Karla replace her.

And then she opened her eyes as Jenny again. And Jenny cried because, while she could step across the barrier as she pleased, she could not speak through it. While she was Karla Valentine, she could not also be  _ with  _ Karla Valentine, who she loved. How could she not? She had endured every wound that Karla had suffered, every disappointment. How could she tell Karla that  _ she  _ would not disappoint her? How could she get to the other side?

Her phone buzzed. She sniffed, wiped her eyes and picked it up. The screen was overbright in the dark room. Another text from Sam. She sniffed irritably.  
  
  


* * *

ROBILAR and REMONTOIRE stood in the foyer of the single story ranch house, across town from the cemetery. Each tried to outdo the other in grim stoicism, examining the tableau splattered over the living room.

“It’s funny, if you think about it.”

“Huh?”

“Kid punches kid. Kid pulls a gun and shoots kid. School shooter. Goes to jail.”

“Sure.”

“Then they turn 18. Grown man punches grown man. Grown man shoots grown man. Castle Doctrine. Everyone stands up and claps.”

“Right. So just wait a year and then do it?”

“No, that’s not the- nevermind.”

The cell phone dropped at the graveyard belonged to Alice Frobisher. The Agents found some  _ very  _ interesting videos on the SD card. So they paid a visit to her house, and found her dad amid a wreckage of beer bottles and old takeout containers.

He had been messily randomized, tissues in the core of the body melted and blended together as though by a great heat. There was an exit wound in the torso, probably the result of boiling fluid escaping the overheated cavity the only way it could. An ugly death, and recent. The rancid hot tallow smell was still fresh.

He had been intoxicated when it happened, that much was obvious. Not enough to knock him out, but enough to impair his judgement. Let him act on all that anger percolating inside his flabby body.

The daughter wasn’t home. Judging by a quick room search, she had left in a hurry, on foot.

They had an idea what she had done, and they had an idea where she was going. Neither was excited about what they’d do when they got there.

* * *

Mackey lay on the couch, crossfaded with THC and a forty he swiped from the gas station way down the interstate, looking and feeling like a pile of discarded laundry.

It was late, dark outside. His dad was out somewhere. Working, or at a bar maybe. His faggy brother and his faggy brother’s dyke girlfriend were upstairs, crawling all over each other. He should have left when she came over, looking like she had just ran from her house. But he was already fucked up and didn’t feel like walking anywhere. So he lay on the couch, malt liquor mostly finished, roach burnt to a useless cinder, and listened to the sound of bedsprings and muffled grunting above him.

He thought about the Dog. Not the Dog, really, but about Halima. The odalisque-turned-roadagent from the waning years of the Ottoman Empire, whose persona the Dog slipped into sometimes. As a reward to him for mastering one of its teachings. He wanted to be surly, but he thought about her heavy voice and heavy tits. The way she always swore she was through with lazy men and their selfish dicks, then sidled up to him with a knowing smile.

Could he get away with jacking off on the couch? He didn’t want to go upstairs to his room, where he’d have to listen to his brother getting railed on the other side of the wall. But he also didn’t want to get caught in the living room with his dick out. Or would that be a nice taste of his own medicine for Vo? See how  _ he  _ liked walking in on it. But then he’d think Mackey was thinking about him and Alice, and that was totally lame. Plus his dad might come home - but then he’d hear the car outside and have time to put it away.

Fuck it, he could worry about all that in a second. He unzipped his pants, grabbed a (mostly) clean Burgerdrome napkin from the coffee table, and got a handle on his junk.

Then the front door opened, without a car-sound to presage it.

Mackey should have scrambled to put his dick away, pretended to be asleep. Instead, he froze, listening for the telltale sound of his dad wheezing and grumbling to himself.

Freezing is what saved his life, because it wasn’t his dad. The footsteps came through the hall to the livingroom, quiet like bare feet.

It was a man in a bulletproof vest. He had a pistol.

Mackey held his breath. The man moved through the living room, gun at the ready, checking his corners, ready to dive for cover and open fire at the first sign of danger.

He exited Mackey’s field of view without noticing him.

There was a flick knife in one of Mackey’s coat pockets, a cell phone in the other, and the zipper of his pants hanging open. He wasn’t sure which one to reach for first.

He heard the stairs creak, under the tread of the man’s heavy, stockinged feet going up to the second floor. 

The decision had been made for him.

* * *

The Talking Dog rolled over in its burrow. It had eaten a family of possums and now it dreamed that it was running. It kicked a hind leg and its overlong face split into a toothy smile as it scampered down a passage underneath the last pyramid, chasing a man through complete darkness. The man careened off a wall and fell over. The Dog lept. The man screamed. Then someone whispered to the Dog and it woke up.

“Hey.”

The face swam before it. It couldn’t remember where it was. Was it supposed to eat him? Maybe just to be safe-

Oh, it recognized that smell. Old spice and nervous puberty. It was Sam. Crouching at the mouth of the pit. Blocking the starlight with his massive shoulders and thick neck.

“Alice did something real bad. We all gotta go, before anyone finds you.”

The Dog rolled onto its hind legs and stood up at a crouch, ridges of its spine pressed to the roof of the tunnel. It scraped through the scrimshawed bones that filled its lair until it found the paper mache mask, spraypainted silver by the children. It searched the many brains within it's brain for a phrase or memory to suit the circumstances. Then it spoke in a woman’s voice, husky with an accent that vanished from the earth before the first ziggurats were raised at Uruk.

“In olden times, the followers of More Digging were hunted by the inquisitors of You And Day the elk. They escaped by burrowing deep beneath the earth where the green robed hunters dared not follow. In this manner they found their way waking for the first time into the Land of Dreams.”

Sam screwed up his face in incomprehension. “Ok but we have to go  _ now _ .”

The Dog pawed through the litter on the floor until it found the robe - a purple bedsheet that it gathered around itself. It picked up the most important scripture-bone, opened its crocodile-like jaw and ate it whole.

Then it stooped and exited the burrow, emerging from under the garden shed in Sam’s backyard. Sam’s convertible was idling outside the garage, Jenny in the shotgun seat. A mirror neuron fired in the Dog’s head, indicating the appropriate choice was to change again. It took the form of Karla Valentine, and let Karla Valentine see and hear and speak and think for it.

Karla Valentine felt the momentary spark of horror she always did when taken out of the box. Where was she? What the hell was she wearing? Then she saw Jenny, looking so anxious and wretched that her heart broke.

“Aw, honey…”

Karla got into the car, leaping over the door instead of opening it. Jenny climbed over the seat and sat next to her in the back. Then realized how needy and awkward it made her look, and that Karla was naked under the robe. Sam came out of the house carrying a backpack. You couldn’t see it in the dark, without superb night vision, but he jealously scowled to see Jenny and Karla touching like that.

Watching through the eyes of Karla Valentine, the Talking Dog was proud of the children. Jenny was the most advanced, but they would all understand eventually.

They had brought it home, one day they would be ready to follow _it_ home. Where they really belonged.


	12. OUTBREAK

Agent Daria Zarhurst Corrino was leaving her apartment, eyes downcast, lost in thought, when she was hit by a car. The car was “drifting” and it hit her side on with a deliberate whip-like arc. She fell, went crunch and skidded on the wet pavement.

Her first thought was that one of her shoes had fallen off. Her second was to reach for the Bodyguard in her SOB holster. Her dominant arm was mangled from the collision, and the attempt produced only an uncontrolled thrashing motion. Someone stepped out of the car, which she could hear but not see - her eyes were focusing at different distances, producing a fuzzy depth-of-field effect around everything. She suspected this might be the end of the conversation. She tried to reach the gun with her off-hand, clawing at the flaps of her blazer ineffectually. Then they were on top of her.

One of them knew what he(?) was doing, the other had more enthusiasm than experience. They got her piece, her badge and her phone (which she heard clatter on the pavement. So much for the tracking function). They got her into the car, lifting when she couldn’t walk. Both scrupulously avoided striking her in the head. That may have been too little too late - even before they bagged her, she was having trouble with her vision. The first telltale sign the collision had scrambled her brains. The second was when she puked inside the bag they put over her head. Definitely a concussion.

* * *

The car ride contained little useful information for Daria. There were three of them, one on either side of her and one driving. Two men and a woman. Older sounding, but no way to know. They lifted the bag for a second to make sure she didn’t choke, but held her face away so she couldn’t see. She was having trouble focusing anyway. She listed who might be behind this, but gave up when she couldn’t hold more than one or two possibilities at a time.

At the safehouse, they continued to know what they were doing. They had guns, which she hadn’t seen but suspected, and never got in a situation where she might grab one off them. Even with her hands tied. But despite all that, there was this air of hastiness and desperation. Like whatever they were doing had been planned by the last living brain cells the trio could scrape together.

“We know who you work for, Dr Corrino” sez the tall guy, early sixties maybe.

They called her doctor, so they had got some wires crossed, somewhere. She shrugged off a couple seconds of microsleep, He was still talking.

“-roject BEEHIVE. You know the one it was based on. Down in Puerto Rico.”

Outbreak? Overcoat? It was difficult to think. Strysik would know better. Maybe she should give them his number. Her arm was killing her, bent at a weird angle and handcuffed to the other.

The shorter guy was talking. “Your head lice did some work on us. We want it f- ...fiii-”

He looked ready to kick something. The inability to recall words was killing him. She could relate.

“….We want you to un-do it.”

Ah, so they were patients. From the old days, before the handover. Fuck, it was so hard to keep track of all this shit.

Daria licked her lips and croaked out a reply:

“What work?”

The third one, the woman, grunted something unintelligible and hit Daria in the stomach. She was small, which just meant her fists had a smaller surface area to deliver the same hammer blow. Which derailed the interrogation when Daria inhaled some of her own vomit.

The big guy left the room in a hurry - or stepped far enough outside her field of vision she couldn’t see him. Her eyes were still fucked up, and now they were full of sweat, tears, snot and stomach acid. Maybe he didn’t like violence.

So the short guy made sure her airways were un-fucked so she could talk. The woman babbled something, which the guy appeared to sort of understand. She gave up and passed him a note Daria couldn’t see. He didn’t like whatever it said. He turned back to her and smiled anyway.

“You wanna t- You wanna attempt again to get smart with us?”

“No. What work did they do?” She screwed up her face in thought. Her arm really fucking hurt. “Who did it? Do you remember? I need you to describe symptoms.”

He scowled. But it was a thinking scowl, not a precursor to striking her again.

“I forget sometimes, what I’m trying to- to speak. You know?” 

Daria nodded. Inside, she drunkenly stumbled through the file cabinets of her own brain, looking for the right drawer.

“She-” he pointed to the woman, “Can’t use any words at all”

The small woman scowled. Her scowl was for sure the striking kind.

“And the big guy, he’s a- he’s a… He’s de-violenced. He can’t use a…” The man lifted his jacket to show the pistol on his belt.

Daria nodded.

“And do you remember who did it? How they did it?”

That made the little guy angry.

“If I could… If I had a picture in my head for it, we wouldn’t have this fucking, this fucking thing happening, now would we?”

The Aphasic woman handed him another hastily scribbled note. He squinted at it, sketched something and passed it back to her. Turned back to Daria.

“It was ninety nine, in Puerto… on the island. There was a guy, he had a…” The guy tapped his ear, made a circular motion

A hearing aid. So he was one of Strysik’s after all.

Daria closed her eyes, like she was thinking. Which was a mistake, triggering another wave of nausea. It was now or never.

“And did you ever Take This Pill, and Forget You Were Ill?”

That was it. The aphasic woman blinked. Licked her lips.

Spoke intelligibly for the first time in a decade.

“Will you marry me?”

The short man was stunned. Delighted. Why were those her first words? Had she been trying to ask that all these years, unable to express the concept through drawings and hand movements?

She asked again. “Will you marry me?”

And she pulled out her gun.

“Will you marry me?”

And shot him twice through the solar plexus with a practiced motion.

The no-longer-aphasic woman stood, drooling, gun held loosely. Her pupils flickered between their widest and narrowest bands, capturing the room around her at a framerate far in excess of what her eyes should have been able to process. When the third guy came through the door, holding Daria’s gun (which it appeared he could use after all), wondering what the hell was happening, it wasn’t even a contest. She blew him away with a range-perfect three round group.

Five gunshots in a room, without earpro. Daria’s hearing was about as fucked as her vision. She had to imagine the woman still mouthing “Will you marry me?”

She didn’t have to imagine the woman turning to look at her. That was for sure happening where she could see it. 

The woman’s hand jerked. The gun pointed at Daria’s stomach.

That wasn’t supposed to happen.

Ok, she found the right activation phrase. Now what was the stop code?

“Will you marry me?”

What was the fucking stop code?

Her head hurt.

She was having trouble remembering.


	13. PLAYBACK

SHEAF was doing overwatch for SALUSA and SIMON, while they went into the mausoleum to see if the sarcophagi had been tampered with. He stepped away from the car for a moment to vomit so he’d be able to think straight. When he came back to the edge of the road, there were two men going through the beater the team bought for the opera. They wore vests under their jackets, carried long guns on slings, and talked to an unknown third party on earpieces as they searched the vehicle.

_ Walk away. Scrub the operation.  _ Was the smart decision.

Three similarly attired figures swept past the pair, similarly armed with long guns. They passed through the stone arch leading into the necropolis and disappeared from view.

_ Make some noise. Draw their attention, let S and S know there’s trouble.  _ Was the right decision.

The man with the CAR slung at his chest got the trunk open. The guy with the MP5 laughed at something on the earpiece. Rifle guy was a bigger threat - bullets less likely to deflect off the trees and bushes and soft earth of the forest off the dirt road where SHEAF was hidden. He aimed low with the scattergun, at the unprotected belly, groin and legs of his adversary. He fired before he could talk himself out of it.

He got off two shots before they realized they were under fire. The pump was heavy and hard to work from his almost-prone position in the swale, but he fired a third and a fourth round before the second guy got behind the wheel arch of the car. Jacket number one was on the ground, but SHEAF didn’t know if he’d actually hit him, or if he’d dropped instinctively when he heard the shots. He fired his last round to make sure he had their attention, dropped the now useless Mossberg, and fled into the woods. He heard the sub-gun spray the berm behind him, along with a distant shout.

He ran for three times the distance he thought necessary, only stopping once to puke a second time. There were more gunshots, none aimed at him.

* * *

_ TWO DEAD IN CEMETERY GUNFIGHT _

SHEAF read the headline and swore. The article did not flatter him. It did not mention him at all.

_ Disgraced law enforcement agent and local petty criminal… killed in exchange of gunfire… _

The trouble with being the only survivor of a botched operation was, it made you look bad. Either you ran when the others were counting on you and got them killed, or worse: you were in on it the whole time. The other side was behind this article, and the intent was clear. A would read the article and wonder:  _ what happened to number three? _

SHEAF was the only one with a line to A. If he resurfaced, they’d assume he had been turned by the opposition. If he didn’t report back, they’d assume he was dead, or gone to ground, or been turned by the opposition. After enough time had passed, they’d reuse the letter S. Draw up a SALUBRIA and SALTON and SAVOY. He’d heard rumors from a connect in U that he was already flying a recycled codename. That there might be a SCRIBBLE or SAMSON still out there.

And the other side had his number. The shotgun was clean, same with the car. But the pools of vomit would be filled with his DNA, which would be in the Federal databases to screen him out in case he ever contaminated his own crime scene. If he went back to his life, they’d be waiting for him.

What all that meant was, he needed to make them an offer  _ before _ A realized he wasn’t coming home, changed all the locks, then put him on the list for “retirement”.

So he picked up the motel phone, dialed a number at random, and used every ECHELON keyword he knew, before the bewildered animal control officer on the other end could hang up.

* * *

They sent local cops first. Expendable uniforms to trigger whatever obvious trap SHEAF had set. When nobody sprang out of the motel pool to machine gun the harness bulls, they followed up with one of the real players - or someone who could play the part of a real player. A targeting officer from an unknown agency, bright and friendly.

He hated how fucking happy they always seemed. Like they had the best job in the world. The Laughing MAJICians.

She took him to a wine bar, with patched leather couches and lots of records stacked on the shelves. She made him order whatever he wanted, on the unknown-agency tab, before she would allow him to talk about a deal. He ordered the most expensive thing he expected to actually enjoy. She treated herself to the pickled vegetables, laid out on a wooden board.

SHEAF knew no surviving agents whose identities he could burn. His phone line to A would not be open for much longer, and was probably untraceable anyway. His real offer was material: the location of several storage sites where S had deposited things from previous Operas. A singing disc. An unknown biological resin that absorbed heat. A box of floppy disks, loaded with software for teaching geometry. A statue that dreamed of itself, recursively, forever. Then there was that house they were supposed to be monitoring, and which frankly, A would be glad to get rid of. That was a poison pill, and he told her as much when he gave her the address. It didn’t matter, though. The other side would keep feeding agents into it, just as the group had done. He had to get up and vomit periodically. Even before she opened the second bottle of the ‘87 Cab.

He finished the list, and then the second bottle. Someone pulled a disc off the shelf and tossed it in the sound system. He looked like SIMON for a second. Then he was just some waiter. The instruments came from inside the walls.

On the way out, they gave him his gun back.

* * *

They took SHEAF to a much nicer hotel than the one he was staying at. He got to keep his gun, but the phone only reached as far as the front desk. He was given to understand, by gentle suggestion, that he should not try to leave, and he would be there until the information he had given could be verified.

He amused himself by writing things that came into his head, consuming things from room service, consuming things from the minibar, and watching television. He relaxed enough that he kept most of it down, then all of it when he ordered more. 

He still worried that the phone was going to ring, and A was going to ask for a report. Even under the loving protection of the opposition, he feared the long reach of the group. That was why he had, as a condition of the deal, demanded that his new loving family send cleaners to his place of residence and remove every biological trace that he had ever been there. He knew what an enlightened master could do with a hank of hair and a scrap of knotted, blooded cloth. He had heard the stories of what A did to traitors. He called room service and asked for some paperclips from the business center, and spent an hour folding them into tree-leaves, hoping that one of them might be the correct shape.

He woke up a few hours after. The TV was still on, the lights were off. Did someone come in, or did they go out automatically when nobody moved? The blue light hurt his eyes in the dark. The door opened.

He had never seen her naked, but he recognized her anyway, in the half-light of the hallway as the door swung sloooowly shut.

Had A found him? Was this to be his punishment?

SALUSA moved with a swaying motion, like a drunken cartoon character. She gamboled into the light cast by the TV, and he saw her body’s support structure had been broken, fragmented by a bullet. When she blinked, a dozen wounds spackling chest, belly, thigh and throat blinked with her, fluttering like oversized pores.

He remembered the mission.

The sarcophagi had not been tampered with.

_ Not yet. _

The gun was on the nightstand. He closed his eyes when he shot her, to stop the flash from blinding him in the dark room. The first shot made a neat little hole between her breasts, which winked and moaned softly in time with the others. The second hit the TV, extinguishing the only light source in the room with a cathode-ray flash.

She surged toward him in the darkness.

He tried to vomit, and nothing came out.


	14. NEVER LET GO

Drowny, Bronson and Smolt, in the car. There was a gray beach on one side, with a gray sea and gray clouds. On the other side there were sandy bluffs, just high enough to block line of sight. It wasn’t raining. They were driving to a house on the water, at the end of the spit. None of them had guns, that would have defeated the purpose. They were having an argument.

“It should be me. I’m the oldest” says Bronson, enormous, crammed into the driver’s seat.

“You’re always the oldest, dear” says Smolt, smoking, too short to exhale out the cracked window from a sitting position.

“Oh don’t you FUCKING start with that now.” It put Bronson in a sour mood, to be reminded. “Are you always an annoying cunt, too? Did they program that in?”

Smolt expertly flicked the remains of the cigarette through the cracked window. “Now and forever”

“Can you stop, please?” Drowny, from the back seat. Too tall, hunched over, so her head didn’t pin to the ceiling of the car. “If it’s you then I don’t want this to be how I remember you. And if it’s me then I don’t want it to be the last thing I remember”

“It’s not going to be you” Smolt, reassuring as always.

“Well why not?”

“Because, we didn’t get you this far just to chop you up for meat”

“Well, what if that’s what’s supposed to happen? Like why I’m here with-”

“Will you FUCK OFF with this already?” Bronson shouted. “What if it’s meant to be? What if I’m here on this world to put my foot up your ass?”

Auld man Waits came on the radio and they stopped arguing for that. Croaking along, each in their own key.

* * *

The dream that brought them together was of the control garden, dusted with marine snow and lit by volcanic smoke in sulfurous yellows and coppery greens. Hagfish slithered inside their skulls, burrowing into their language centers. They closed their eyes deferentially and let the thoughts of Coral Mother pulverize their dreaming brains with meaning.

“I’m adding you to an assignment that’s gone wrong, but will be easy to correct”

_ Yes, Mother _

“A man, again. We need a son by him”

_ Of course, Mother _

“He has already killed the three of you, once”

The existence of the clonesibs was supposed to be a secret. Bronson, Drowny and Smolt were meant to believe they were the only Bronson, Drowny and Smolt. To acknowledge the existence of the duplicates caused complications. This mission was supposed to be the first they were hearing of it.

“When he sees that you are still alive he will think you are here for revenge. He’ll kill the first of you he sees.”

_ Who, Mother? _

“Choose among yourselves. The effect will be the same, regardless”

_ Understood, Mother _

“He will be crippled with guilt. The two of you will tell him you forgive him. Then you will accomplish the mission”

_ Always, Mother _

The hagfish bored through their brain stems and they woke up.

So Smolt got in the car and picked up the other two, and they went for a drive. And that’s why they were driving to the end of the spit, arguing about who it was going to be.

* * *

So they got most of the way there without coming to a decision. They could see the house at the end of the spit, a blue spot between the gray sky and the endless gray expanse. They could have swam, risen out of the earth naked and dripping and enticed him that way. But they knew it had to be like this. In the car together, one last time.

Was this how it had gone, last time? The Smolt, Drowny and Bronson they would never meet?

Smolt thought about it. Drowny thought about it. Bronson, committed not to reflecting on the subject, thought about it.

After Mister Waits was Beach House, and they couldn’t argue over that either.


	15. IT'S MORE THAN A BAD DREAM, NOW THAT I'M SOBER

**Special Agent Esme GAGNON Parkreiner** wades through waist deep water as a presence rushes toward her. It crawls up inside her body and takes residence, waiting until she’s dumb enough to let it out. Encouraging her with pain and misfired signals to her involuntary nervous system.

She wakes sweating, suffocating, pinned to the bed by the weight of her own gravid belly. Zhi is gone, downstairs or something. He must have removed her sidearm from the end table, afraid of what she might do in the first panicked moments of wakefulness. The baby gives her a little kick, its half formed mind perhaps lost in a false reality of its own.

It’s a wonder she got to sleep at all.

**Barry EREBUS Vredenberg** is running, screaming, looking for that which has been taken from him. His body is slowly melting because of something he can’t see, and he can’t stop it, he’s powerless, his limbs are shattering like glass and it’s tearing him apart, face melting and flashing black and white like a seizure.

He wakes curled around the axe, the head tucked under his chin, pressing into his throat. The leather sheath on the blade didn’t slip, this time. He isn’t bleeding. His wife is still gone.

He slips the cover off the head. It’s still the perfect, fuligin black he remembers. As though it would go anywhere. But what’s this - a speck of dust on the other side? A damned spot?

He takes it to the first floor bathroom. The one he turned into a workshop, with chemicals. A little MEK will get that clump of hair off it.

**Lem BITEY Landsmen, RN** can’t move. They tell him it’s so fantastic they were able to catch it in time, now they can operate and once they’re done he’ll be just fine. It’s not right, there’s nothing wrong with him. It isn’t supposed to be this way.

They start cutting, just outside his field of view. There’s no pain but it feels wrong, even through the anesthesia. They take parts out, parts that don’t belong to him but he can’t live without. Squirming things. Things that look like him.

It goes on like this for hours and hours.

He wakes up pinned to the mattress, squinting out of a black eye. He was kicking so hard that Jay had to wrestle him. He caught his face on Jay’s hand when he whipped his head forward.

“Well that’s just fucking great” he dribbles, grinding the heel of his palm into his face in frustration. “Like anyone will buy that.  _ I ran into a doorknob, honest! _ ”

Jay goes to the kitchen to get ice.

**Dr Josef RANDOLPH McCoy** is slogging through the mud toward the extract, the bird that will carry him out of the steaming jungles at the waist of the world. There is no moon and when the shape rushes out of the paddy field at him, he fires. The flash lights up the figure and this time it’s not a man in black pajamas. It’s a little girl, books under arm and going home. He tries to yank the gun off target but the little bullet hose is drawn like a dowser’s wand. The stream of tracers punches an eye out the back of her head and she doesn’t fall, just goes on screaming.

His sweat stinks of gin and the blanket is wadded and wrapped around his head. The car is still moving under him and his hands are still zip tied behind him. Someone in the front seat is talking softly in some kind of code. If anyone replies, he can’t hear it.

**Special Agent In Charge Archimedes GERARD Brabrand, JD** is a doll. A husk of a living thing, all the life sucked out of him and replaced with something else. He doesn’t need air or water or food, which is good because the world doesn’t have any. It’s a pile of frozen trash, lit blood red and deep purple in the fading starlight. He tries to think of something he misses, about the way things used to be. Someone he wishes would come back.

He sits up in his chair before he can think of anything. His headset has slipped slightly, dangling around his neck. The conference call is faintly audible, deputy director buzzing on about potential rulemakings and outcomes of federal court decisions.

He gets up to drop another keurig in the coffee machine, taking the wireless headphones and meaningless discussion with him.

Somewhere along the way, he closes his eyes and opens them again over that airless waste.

**Dianne GERRI Hellespont** is outside the cabin again. The little one, in Vermont. It’s springtime, and the melting snow is coming down the hills as a little stream that cools her against the soggy blanket of the noon heat. Buried in a hidden place up in those rocks, she’s got money, papers, a good pair of boots. A gun, if she wants it. But right now there’s no need for all that. The sun is warm and the water is cold, and there are green, living things all around her.

She looks at the springs of the bunk above her. She turns her head to the drawings on the wall of that same cabin, the one she’s pictured all these years, barely visible now in the barred moonlight from the window.

She thinks about the sharp piece of metal, wrapped with twine to make a handle, hidden where the screws will never find it. She thinks about the woman sleeping above her, soft throat occasionally making those sleep apnea sounds. She thinks about the words of passage.

She goes back to sleep.

**Agent Matthew SHALIMAR Gomez** is swimming through a city on the sun. He can’t remember ever being this happy. He can’t remember anything. The superfluous parts of him are burned away, leaving not even the nucleus of the self. There was a little guy, once, living inside a body, somewhere out there. Now he lives here, forever.

He vomits tube worms and seawater on the floor of the morgue.

**Sgt Kam Vo** is not being slowly dissolved by a house sized ball of tar in a cold place. His unit has crawled through a blue lit portal into a world where nobody dies screaming as their marrow is drawn out through their skin. A reward for loyal services rendered to the Empress. He is tilling a field on a hill in a forest with a strange machine. He is shrugging off his coat in a cabin in the snow, warmed by heat that comes on enormous ropes that dangle from poles between the trees. He has two small children and they touch the funny scars on  _ bô _ ’s arms with their little hands, asking where he got them from, and where his missing fingers went.

He sits down with a mug of the hot, bitter drink they sip in this world, and he tells them scary stories about the place he’ll be taken back to when this dream ends. Back to rushing water in lightless caves, and the things even the shoggoths are afraid of.

He does not wake.


End file.
